When I was at Microsoft I heard a lot about the evils of free open source software. I didn't buy all of the arguments, and haven't thought about this much in a couple of years.
I've been dealing with Google a fair bit in my current role, and I hear about open source pretty much every day. The Android team at Google seems to love open source. They've built an entire mobile operating system, made most of it open source, and don't charge anything for the client license if you want to ship a product.
And they want the folks who work with them to contribute their code to open source. They want my firm to lean on our third party vendors to offer their stuff to open source. Open source means free. Open source means that anyone can use it, modify it, and ship it.
On a call today we were discussing a very specific example, and the horror of open source hit me square in the face. Google would prefer to work with developers who will contribute their work to open source. Most developers have a hard enough time making money from their applications, and Google wants them to give away the fruit of their labor. I'm not sure that Google cares about how the developer is supposed to make money - or maybe they do, and assume that the developer will make money through peripheral means. Like advertising.
jason
Backwards penalty kick
7 months ago
1 comments:
I believe that Google's goal is to push the value of software to zero. Then Google wins on the strength of its service operations and ad-serving monopoly.
I wrote about this idea in this post.
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